That fall, Muriel and I took a course at the New School in contemporary american poetry, and I went into therapy. There were things I did not understand, and things I felt that I did not want to feel, particularly the blinding headaches that came in waves sometimes.
And I seldom spoke. I wrote and I dreamed, but almost never talked, except in answer to a direct question, or to give a direction of some sort. I became more and more aware of this the longer Muriel and I lived together.
With Rhea, as with most of the other people I knew, my primary function in conversations was to listen. Most people never get a chance to talk as much as they want to, and I was an attentive listener, being really interested in what made other people tick. (Maybe I could squirrel it off and examine their lives in private and find out something about myself.)
Muriel and I communicated pretty much by intuition and unfinished sentences. Libraries are supposed to be quiet, so at work I didn’t have to talk, except to point out where books were, and tell stories to the children. I was very good at that, and I loved to do it. It felt like reciting the endless poems I used to memorize as a child, and which I would retell to myself and anybody else who would listen. They were my way of talking. To express a feeling, I would recite a poem. When the poems I memorized fell short of the occasion, I started to write my own.
I also wanted to go back to college. The course we were taking at the New School didn’t make too much sense to me, and the idea of studying was not a familiar one to me. I had managed high school without it, and nobody had bothered to notice. I entered college believing one learned by osmosis, and by concentrating intently on what everybody said. That had meant survival in my family’s house.
When I left college, I said to myself at the time that one year of college was more than most Black women had and so I was already ahead of the game. But when Muriel came to New York, I knew I was not going back to Mexico any time soon, and I wanted a degree. I had had tastes of what job-hunting was like for unskilled Black women. Even though I had a job which I enjoyed, I wanted someday not to have to take orders from everybody else. Most of all, I wanted to be free enough to know and do what I wanted to do. I wanted not to shake when I got angry or cry when I got mad. And the city colleges were still free.
I started therapy on the anniversary of the first day Muriel and I met the year before.
On Thanksgiving Day, we fixed a great feast in celebration and invited Suzy and Sis for dinner. Since even at student rates therapy was a luxury, and we had only one income between us, money became even tighter. The day before Thanksgiving, I took my mail-pouch pocketbook and Muriel put on her loosest fitting jacket, and we went across town to the A&P next to Jim Atkins’s, the all-night diner in the Village. We came back with a little capon, two pounds of mushrooms, a box of rice, and asparagus. The asparagus was the hardest of all to get, and some of the tips were broken from being tucked so quickly into Muriel’s waistband. But we managed without mishap or detection, and walked home whistling and pleased.
About stealing food from supermarkets—I felt that if we needed it badly enough, we would not get caught. And truth to tell, I stopped doing it when I no longer had to, and I never did get caught.
On our way home we splurged on a pint of cherry-vanilla ice cream for dessert, and Suzy and Sis brought the wine. Muriel made an italian pepper and egg pie, and we had a wonderful feast. I brought out all my Mexican rugs and rebozos, and decorated the walls and the chairs and the couch with bright colors. The house looked and smelled holiday happy.
That night, I announced that I had made up my mind to register for college at night in the spring term.
Muriel and I kept Christmas on Christmas Eve, such keeping as we did. We exchanged our presents, grumbled a lot, and prepared to go our separate families’ ways the next day. We wrapped their presents, and worried about what we could wear home that would not be too uncomfortable, yet appropriate enough to forestall questions and comments.
On Christmas Day, with many kisses and long goodbyes, Muriel went to Stamford and I went up to the Bronx to my sister Phyllis’s home to have dinner with her and Henry and the children, along with my mother and Helen. Phyllis had a family and a real house, not an apartment, so it was tacitly agreed that she keep Christmas. It relieved me of another direct confrontation with my mother’s house, and gave me a chance to enjoy my two nieces, whom I loved but did not often see. I made a big project of inviting them down to Seventh Street afterward, but they never came.
Christmas we gave to our families; New Year’s we kept for ourselves. They were two separate worlds. My family knew that I had a roommate named Muriel. That was about all. My mother had met Muriel, and as usual, since I had left her house, knew it was wise to make no comment about my personal life. But my mother could make “no comment” more loudly and with more hostility than anyone else I knew. Muriel and I had been to Phyllis’s house for dinner once, and whatever Phyllis and Henry thought about our relationship, they kept it to themselves. In general, my family only allowed themselves to know whatever it was they cared to know, and I did not push them as long as they left me alone.
On New Year’s Eve, Muriel and I went to a party at Nicky and Joan’s house. They lived in a brownstone in the eighties near Broadway. Nicky was a writer who worked on a fashion newspaper and Joan was a secretary at Metropolitan Life. Nicky was tiny and tight; Joan was lean and beautiful, with dark spaniel eyes. Unlike Muriel and I, they looked very proper and elegant in their straight clothes, and for that reason, and because they lived so far uptown, it felt like they lived a far more conventional life than we did. In some ways, this was true, for Nicky in particular. Joan was talking about quitting her job and becoming a bum for a while. I envied her the freedom of choice that allowed her to consider this, knowing she could get another job whenever she wanted one. That was what being white and knowing how to type meant.
This was to be a holiday fete, not simply a wash-your-foot-and-come. I never enjoyed parties much if Muriel and I weren’t giving them, although I had started to really enjoy the parties out in Queens that we went to with Vida and Pet and Gerri. Those parties given by Black women were always full of food and dancing and reefer and laughter and high-jinks. Vida with her dramatic voice and sense of the absurd, and Pet with her dancing feet that were never still, made it easy not to be shy, to move with the music and laughter. It was at those parties that I finally learned how to dance.
Joan and Nicky’s parties were different. Usually there wasn’t much music, and when there was, it was not for dancing. There was always lots of wine around, both red and white, because Nicky and Joan were more Bermuda shorts than dungarees. One of the noticeable differences between the two sets was wine versus hard liquor. But more than one glass of any kind of wine gave me heartburn, and besides it was all too dry for my taste. It was not sophisticated to like sweet wine, and that became another one of my secret vices, like soft ice cream, to be indulged only around tried and true friends.
And there was never enough food. Tonight, for the holidays, a beautifully laid table graced the corner of Nicky and Joan’s great, high-ceilinged parlor. Upon an old linen tablecloth that had belonged to Nicky’s mother, and bright red poinsettia mats cut from felt, sat little plates of potato chips and pretzels and crackers and cheeses, a bowl of sour cream and onion dip made from Lipton’s onion soup mix, and tiny little jars of red caviar with bright green bibs around them. There were saucers of olives and celery and pickles on the edges of the table, and in various corners of the room, baskets of mixed nuts. I kept thinking of the pigs-in-a-blanket and fried chicken wings and potato salad and hot corn bread at Gerri and them’s last “do,” knowing it wasn’t a question of money, because red caviar cost a lot more than chicken wings.
The feeling in the room was subdued. Mostly, women sat around in little groups and talked quietly, the sound of moderation—thick and heavy as smoke in the air. I noticed the absence of laughter only because I always thought parties were supposed to be fun, even though I didn’t find them particularly so, never knowing what to say. I busied myself looking through the bookshelves lining the room.
Muriel circulated with ease. She seemed in her element, her soft voice and fall-away chuckle moving from group to group, cigarette and bottle of beer in hand. I studied the books, uncomfortable and acutely aware of being alone. Pat, a friend of Nicky’s from the paper, came over and started to talk. I listened appreciatively, greatly relieved.
Muriel and I left shortly after midnight, walking over to the subway on Central Park West arm in arm. It was good to be out in the sharp cold air, even good to be a little tired. We frolicked through the almost empty streets, talking and laughing about nonsensical things, joking about our uptown friends who drank dry wine. Occasional blasts from party horns were still erupting from gaily lit windows, holiday open.
In the freshness and nip of the winter’s late night, alone now with Muriel, something powerful and promising inside of me stretched, excited and joyful. I thought of other New Year’s Eves that I had spent, alone, or wandering through Times Square. I was very lucky, very blessed.
I squeezed Muriel’s hand, and felt her tight squeeze back. I was in love, a new year was beginning, and the shape of the future was a widening star. It was one year to the day that Muriel and I had locked the door of Seventh Street behind Rhea and turned off the fire under the coffee on the stove and laid down together with our hearts against each other. This was our first anniversary.
We went home and ushered it in quite properly, until dawn sang with the rhythms of our bodies, our heat.
Later, we got up, and Muriel cooked a huge pot of hoppin’ john, black-eyed peas and rice, which Suzy’s friend Lion from Philly had taught her how to do, and of which she was very proud. I laughed to see her strutting around the kitchen rosy-cheeked, waving her wooden spoon aloft in triumph as the food reached exactly the right consistency without becoming mushy.
Evening moved upon us, and as our friends dropped by, we wished each other good times and ate and ate. Some of the women were hung-over, and some were depressed, and some were just plain sleepy from being out all night and thinking of work tomorrow. But we all agreed that Muriel’s pot was the best hoppin’ john we’d ever tasted, and that it was going to be a super year for us all.
Nicky and Joan were the last to leave. After they had gone, Muriel and I put the dishes and pots to soak in the covered part of the sink, and we climbed back into bed with our notebooks and wrote New Year themes. Muriel chose a subject—A Man from the Land Where Nobody Lives. When we finished, we exchanged our notebooks and read each other’s work before moving on to the next theme.
Muriel had written:
| The Year 1955 | |
| Audi | Me |
| got a new job | |
| started therapy | |
| sent out some poems | NOTHING! |
| is going back to school | |
I stared at the notebook page in silence, feeling like cold water had been thrown at me. I reached over and took her hand. It lay cool and still beneath my fingers, without movement. I did not know what to say to Muriel. The idea that anyone could measure herself against me and find that self wanting was truly shocking. The fact that it was my beloved Muriel who was doing it was nothing less than terrifying.
I thought of our life as a mutual exploration, a progress through the strength of our loving. But as I read and re-read the stark outline in her notebook, I realized that Muriel saw that joint becoming in terms of achievements of mine which somehow defined her inabilities. They were not mutual triumphs, the notebook said in inescapable terms, and there was nothing either I or our loving could do to shield her from the implications of that truth, as she saw it.